


A Thousand Winter Mornings

by aban_asaara



Series: Shadows at Noontide [4]
Category: Dragon Age II
Genre: Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Established Relationship, F/M, Fluff, Friendship/Love, Humor, Romance, Smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-14
Updated: 2017-06-14
Packaged: 2018-11-07 11:41:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,153
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11058207
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aban_asaara/pseuds/aban_asaara
Summary: (Contains slightly NSFW art!) Fenris slants his forehead against hers and closes his eyes. The air between them is raw with shared grief; he for the mother he may never remember, and she, for the father she never really knew.A discussion of past and family in the wake of Fenris’s Alone quest, with a wee bit of headcanonthat I'm not at all confident about.





	A Thousand Winter Mornings

**Author's Note:**

> Content warnings for allusions to Fenris’s past abuse and slavery, as well as mentions of canon-typical violence and canonical character death.
> 
>   
>  Many, many thanks to the amazingly talented [xla hainex](http://xla-hainex.tumblr.com), who plucked this gorgeous scene right out of my story. ♥

“I think—I remember my mother.”

The words rumble into her ear as she lies nestled against his chest, half-draped over him. Either he’ll say more or he won’t; she knows him well enough by now to know that, so she tucks an arm under her chin and waits. In the grey-white of morn, the lines of his profile are bold and sharp, the lyrium filigreed into his skin stark against it, but the diffuse light that filters through the rain-battered panes does little to clear the clouds that linger in his gaze.

The last time he remembered something of his past he left her—but now his hand is steady on the small of her back, as is the ebb and flow of his breathing, the even flutter of his heartbeat under her palm, where it lies splayed on his chest.

For a long time it’s all she hears over the pitter-patter of the rain, padding the velvety silence and muffling the Hightown bustle outside his window. The quiet of his mansion is unsettling after the constant activity of her own estate: the rattle of Sandal’s enchantment apparatus, Bodahn’s Veil-rending snores, the clatter of Orana’s cooking or the pounding of her carpet beater, the dog barking at shadows, a visitor come to say hello or request the Champion’s help. So whenever Fenris lets her spend the night at the old mansion? Hawke startles at its every squeak and creak despite herself—yet there’s something to be said for the hush of mornings spent like this one, in a tangle of limbs and bedsheets.

“She had green eyes, and red hair like Varania. Not a mage, though, at least not that I can tell from what little I remember. She taught me how to hold a sword. Her hands smelled of cinnamon,” he adds in an undertone.

“Then … that couldn’t have been in Minrathous,” Hawke replies into the crook of her elbow. Fenris told her once how the bark stripped from certain trees will curl up when it dries, how slaves grind it to powder so that magisters can sprinkle it on their desserts—but slave mothers don’t get to teach their children how to hold swords in the Imperium. Instead Hawke is reminded of a land so fantastical she still isn’t convinced Fenris wasn’t making it all up, one night when they lay much as they do now: the air thick with incipient rain and incense smoke and alchemy, showers sheeting down leaves the size of steering oars, glimpses of spotted cats sprawled high up in trees, birds with feathers like the rainbows that spring from the spray of waterfalls, spiders that eat birds and flowers that eat spiders, salted fish hooked on vines, fried banana skewers, tea brewed from cinnamon sticks … “So it’s as you were told, then? You were born on Seheron?”

“So it would seem.”

Her voice drops to a whisper. “… Free?”

“If that’s the case, I don’t recall how it came to be otherwise. Perhaps for the best. I don’t know which is worse—having been born into slavery or forced into it.”

It’s only upon hearing the bitterness darkening his voice that Hawke realises how long it’s been since she last did. “You’re free now. It’s all that matters.”

His finger draws the shell of her ear. “You mean I don’t have to put up with you?”

 _Blasted elf_. “I’m not taking you back if you change your mind again, serah.”

“Not a chance.” Fenris pulls her close to kiss her, and she meets his lips with the same eagerness. Warmth flushes through her, followed by a flutter in her stomach—only for it to start rumbling loud enough to rival the Foundry in Lowtown. He laughs into her mouth as she plants another kiss on his lips before slipping out of bed.

The fire went out at some point during the night: their attention was elsewhere, for one, and between the two of them the heat was such that the dying embers seemed of little import. Now she has to skip across the floor until she stands on carpet again, the cold of the tiles biting into the soles of her feet and the draughts raising gooseflesh on her skin. How Fenris can stand to walk around barefoot all the time is beyond her, and _she’s_ the Fereldan. A flick of her wrist reignites the flames; the hearth comes to life with a whoosh, making the room blush with its ruddy glow. (Fenris used to object to her “frivolous use of magic”—lighting up candles, boiling water, chilling her wine—but relented mid-winter when the promise of a hot bath was just one spell away. She’s made him soft, he claims. She can make him hard if he likes, she teases.)

The room is in more disarray than she remembered. Her gown is draped across the trestle bench, next to a tower of books that she toppled over trying to squeeze herself out of her bodice, skirts swept over her head, while Fenris opted to kiss his way up and down her spine rather than help. One of her stockings is hanging off the whetstone on the table, strewn with candles melted down to stumps, half a loaf of bread, a wheel of soft cheese, a jar of marmalade, two bottles of wine (one empty, one nearly so), and a generous dusting of crumbs from the petits fours she snuck into her handkerchief on her way out of the de Launcet manor. A handful of dainty meringue swirls are left—a little chewy under the tooth but just as sweet on the tongue as they were last night.

Hawke folds a slice of bread onto a piece of cheese and shoves it into her mouth. She inspects her glass as she chews, stained with rings of Antivan red and the rouge she wore for the soirée, then decides against bothering with it, taking a swig from the bottle instead to wash the food down.

Fabric rustles, and she turns to find Fenris standing behind her, wrapped in the blanket. “You hog the covers all night and you still won’t share?”

“Considering all the cookie crumbs and wine you insist on spilling everywhere, is it much of a surprise?”

“Just something to remember me by when I’m gone,” she replies with her sweetest smile, pressing herself against him when he opens his arms to close them back around her.

The heat of his skin against her own sends shivers rippling through her. She rests her head onto his shoulder and looks over the balusters through the door she failed to close behind her last night. In the foyer, light and rain spill into the room in hazy streamers through the collapsed roof. For six years she’s pestered him about fixing the blighted thing, but having stood underneath to pick out shapes in the clouds and watch the stars and Satina and flights of Ferelden-bound birds in the spring, she—gets it.

His gaze follows hers. “Yes, the roof. I know.”

She smiles. “Say, if you were born on Seheron … could your mother have been Viddathari?”

Fenris swallows the meringue that she popped into his mouth before answering. “Tamassrans would have raised me if that were the case. Qunari priests,” he clarifies when she contributes only a blank stare. “Hardly a better fate than slavery at the hands of magisters.”

“A rebel, then?”

The idea makes him laugh, though without mirth. “The rebels I knew would never have allowed themselves to be captured by slavers.”

“If my father taught me anything, it’s that principles are all well and good until you have something to lose. You fall in love with a wide-eyed, noble-born ingenue, get her pregnant, some ancient order abducts her, and then— _oops!_ —blood mage,” Hawke answers with a shrug, but the knife-sharp edge that cuts through her words startles even her.

“You don’t mean that,” Fenris says after a moment.

“No, I don’t,” she sighs. _My magic will serve that which is best in me, not that which is most base_ , said the memory of Malcolm’s voice—words to live by, she knows, though she wishes the memory was her own, not an afterimage twined into the last few lingering strands of forbidden magic. Perhaps time will mellow the hurt into the bittersweet memory of a man who did terrible things to protect his family, but that her father would hold her to a lie dimmed even her dearest memories of him. She lost him again, in a way.

Fenris slants his forehead against hers and closes his eyes. The air between them is raw with shared grief; he for the mother he may never remember, and she, for the father she never really knew.

A kiss on her temple, then a sigh washing over the curve of her neck. “I wanted to believe that Varania was lying. I’d almost convinced myself. I had no concept of freedom until I was stranded on Seheron—why would I have asked Danarius to free her and Mother? But if I remembered a life before slavery … perhaps I thought that was worth the price.”

She tightens her hold around him. “Don’t you feel better knowing that?”

 _Wrong question_ , she realises too late. His body tenses, the ridges of the brands like the fullers of a sword under her hands. “Knowing that I allowed myself to be mutilated and branded with magic for naught? That I was enough of a fool to wish this curse upon myself, let alone fight for it?” He gestures to the lyrium at his throat and chest, then scowls at the blanket as it slips off the both of them to fall to the floor. The sight would be comical were it not for the hard set of his jaw and the flare of his nostrils—he’s fighting some old hurt, she can tell, even as he picks up the blanket and wraps it about her shoulders.

“Yes, what a fool you were, wanting to free your family,” Hawke replies, not unkindly. “Should’ve asked for the harbour view and a feather bed.”

“For all the good freedom did them, _maybe_.” He snatches the bottle off the table and starts pacing, taking a long swallow and wiping the drop of wine that dribbles down his chin with the back of his hand. “They didn’t even _leave_ the Imperium. Varania only did so for the chance to plant a knife into my back after slinking back to her master like a beaten dog.”

“At least you did what you felt was right. Few can say as much in this blight hole.”

“I needn’t have bothered.” He tips the bottle back again, finds it empty this time, and sets it on the windowsill before leaning against it, too, his back to her. “What good was it if it made everything worse?”

“More than you realise, Fenris. It means you were a good person then—just as you are now,” she says, and he _scoffs_ and it breaks her heart a little. “Listen, I thought I was doing my brother a favour by letting him tag along to the Deep Roads, and we both know how that turned out. You tried to give them a better life. You can’t blame yourself for what happened afterwards.”

The only hint that he’s heard her is the slight hunch of his shoulders. When he speaks again, the rancour has gone out of him. “Forgive me, Hawke. It’s unbecoming of me to lose my temper after what happened to your family.”

“Unbecoming” is not the word that comes to her mind watching him pace around naked, but she bites down the jest. She loves him like this, white hair lit up nimbus-like around his head, body limned with morning, all hard lines where she’s soft curves. The lyrium brands reflect the light even where none hits, somehow—a fish-scale glint, glimpsed more than seen, gliding down the nape of his neck, stretching across his shoulder blades and along his spine, curling around the dips on either side of his lower back. His buttocks, so firm under her hands, his thighs strong between her own, her name out of place yet right at home in the stream of Tevene whispered into her ear …

Good thing it’s colder by the window. Fenris accepts the corner of the blanket she offers him and wraps it around himself, careful of her modesty. The season that seeps through the glass has already stuck to his skin, though it can’t seem to find purchase on the markings, leaving his body chased with both lyrium and warmth.

“Unless you think it was unbecoming of me to be upset after my mother and brother died, you don’t have to clam up,” she says, realising he won’t speak again unless she does. “I’m here for you, Fen.”

The wisp of a smile graces his lips. “Yet Varania isn’t dead. I just can’t seem to get her words out of my head. The spite in her voice …” He shakes his head. “Bah, at least she lives.”

Hawke thinks of a wild-caught mother with red hair and hands that smell of cinnamon, teaching her children to hold a sword, to fight and endure and grip chance with both hands when it presents itself and never let go. Fenris and Varania are nothing alike—and yet they are, in a way that she can’t quite put into words. _They have the same eyes_ , she remembers thinking—green as the sea glass that pebbles the sand of the Wounded Coast, wild and wide and _scared_ in the same way that day in the Hanged Man, when Fenris saw Danarius descend the staircase and Varania begged Hawke not to let him kill her. She almost let him, too. After what Varania had done, it wasn’t Hawke’s place to decide whether she deserved Fenris’s mercy. But Danarius lay dead on the filthy floor of the tavern, throat torn out, his reach now only as wide as the blood pooling around him; never again would he be able to pit sister against brother as once he had Fenris against his friends, and Hawke felt certain that if Varania died at his hand, in time, Fenris would come to regret it.

But she’s been certain and _dead wrong_ before. “You don’t wish I—hadn’t intervened? Let you kill her?”

He stares outside, refusing to meet her eyes despite her best efforts. Kirkwall is a colourless blur behind the rain-streaked window. “I don’t know. Sometimes I catch myself wishing she were dead … other times hoping she builds herself a better life even without Danarius.”

“Maybe Merrill can raise him from the dead if you’re that concerned.”

He laughs, and the sound of it rumbles through her and leaves her tingling like her magic after a spell. “I don’t think I could ever be that concerned, I assure you.”

“She seemed capable and stubborn enough. Must run in the family.”

He shifts until he has her against the window, his palms flat on the grilles on either side of her. The glass is so cold against her shoulder blades it tears a gasp out of her, but the space between them is suddenly hotter than the hearth alone can account for. “Stubborn, you say?”

“ _And_ capable. Probably a grump and a slob, though.”

“Mmrph. Birds of a feather, it would seem.”

“Got a little bit of Hawke in you, then?”

The chuckle he lets out puffs against her lips. “Other way around, if I have my way,” he says between their mouths.

One of his hands falls to the curve of her cheek. She closes her eyes, her lashes fluttering against the pad of his thumb as it brushes her cheekbone. When he kisses her again—sweet, and hard and slow—he tastes of red wine and meringue, of promises kept and a thousand winter mornings to come.

His palm is still icy on her skin as it slides down her shoulder to cup her breast. Her nipple hardens between his fingers; his cock responds in kind against her belly, where a blossom of warmth comes open under the slight pressure. She longs for more than the tip of his tongue between her lips, but she forces herself to break from the kiss. “Fenris?”

He pulls back just enough for his eyes to emerge half-lidded from the shadow she casts on his face. He still carries in his gaze that gloom that has been there for as long as she’s known him, but it’s almost lost to the light now, like shadows at noontide. “Hawke?” he replies, her name hanging heavy on lips stained red with wine and kisses.

“Do you want me to call you ‘Leto’?”

The haze in his eyes lifts as they focus on her, disbelief creasing his brow instead. “You have remarkable timing.”

“And good hair. I just thought maybe you’d want to go by the name you received from your mother rather than Danarius.”

Alright—perhaps bringing up his dead mother and former master when he’s half-hard and pressed up against her isn’t one of her finer moments. Still, he indulges her without so much as a sigh. “My mother is dead. And so is Leto for that matter.”

She’s not so certain. She catches glimpses of the boy he must have been once, in the rare instances Fenris lets his guard down, sometimes just a spark in his eyes, there at the corners of his mouth when he smiles, in the light, playful touches that grace her cheek or the small of her back—but she knows better than to argue. “Something else, then.”

He lifts one hand and turns it over in the spars of morning light. The lyrium is etched along the bones of his fingers and across his palm, gathering at the wrist to fan out again down his forearm like the veins of a leaf. “My name … ‘Fenris’ feels as much a part of me as do these markings, and they’re not going away.” His fingers slide down the scar on her stomach, then come to rest at her waist. “Changing my name won’t change that.”

“Well, that’s a relief,” she says, smiling. “I’m sure I would’ve kept getting mixed up, anyway.”

He snorts. “Any other burning questions?”

She shakes her head—not that she would ask even if she had any, because he just slid a finger between her legs and the only thing that’s burning now is the desire consuming her.

Fenris lifts one corner of his mouth before bringing it hard against hers, gripping her thigh with one hand to hook it around his hip. The blanket falls to the floor as Hawke clutches the sill to meet him instead, the heat of him more than enough to ward the chill of winter rain pattering at her back.

**Author's Note:**

>   
>  ... and a close-up, because I love this piece so damn much.
> 
> Thank you so much for reading, and I hope you enjoyed this piece! You can always find me on [tumblr](http://aban-asaara.tumblr.com). ♥


End file.
